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What is even involved in finding a buyer for $10mm btc in usd and then getting that usd into a legal/compliant bank account? Sounds non-trivial. It's my underst

What is even involved in finding a buyer for $10mm btc in usd and then getting that usd into a legal/compliant bank account? Sounds non-trivial. It's my understanding from some work I did for a crypto startup that there is approximately zero usd/btc liquidity, the apparent "usd liquidity" and "usd price" last year was actually dominated by tether-btc and tether-eth liquidity. There was not actually a functional usd/btc market at any point, at least not with liquidity necessary to justify a statement like "startup X holds $10m btc" and this whole thing is a bunch of twenty-five year old entrepreneurs learning about macroeconomics the hard way.

cobookman 8y ago
There's off exchange buyers and sellers of crypto who deal in orders of > 1M usd. It's fairly trivial to go from 10M BTC to 10M of a stable coin. Can't speak on how difficult it is to do 10M stable coin/btc to us bank
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
tim333 8y ago
The BTC/USD market on Kraken is pretty liquid. I think trading $10m wouldn't have been a problem if you spread it over a few days. They are trading $34m/day now and it would have been far more 6 months ago. Not sure what paperwork you need - as long as you could document the source was legit it would probably be ok. Also changing BTC/USDT would at least protected against the decline in value.
- ac29 8y ago
  > as long as you could document the source was legit it would probably be ok. But how many of these ICO's actually did proper KYC/AML stuff? My guess is very, very few, making getting fiat money into a legitimate bank much more difficult.
  - tim333 8y ago
    Yeah not sure about that. I went for a few ICOs. The western ones all had quite a lot of KYC stuff. A Chinese one had nothing but I presume there are some banking arrangements in China that turn a blind eye. The whole China scene seemed pretty unregulated. If you wanted to launder it would probably have been the place though they seem to have cracked down now.
seibelj 8y ago
Circle Trade and Cumberland do OTC trades of large amounts. Nothing is magical about this. https://www.circle.com/en/trade https://www.circle.com/en/trade
- dustingetz 8y ago
  Sure OTC services exist (I believe Coinbase has one) but I think the whales spending $10m on BTC might have an inkling about buy low and sell high – aka they are decidedly not buying during the period between August 2017 and today, which is exactly the period they would need to be buying at scale for all these startups to unload their disintegrating assets.
  - askmike 8y ago
    You are very wrong, OTC markets are very liquid right now. Also $10 million in BTC isn't very much, you can trade this on the public markets without slipping very much if you really want to.
    - dustingetz 8y ago
      yes of course they are liquid now, and of course you can trade it in crypto-crypto markets, the question is if you can trade it for USD cash money in a real bank account, eight months ago
      - leppr 8y ago
        There may have been more slippage than your startup was comfortable with, but the OTC market has always been liquid enough for startups to liquidate ETH/BTC from ICOs, even in the middle of the bear market.
        dustingetz 8y ago
        show us some evidence!

cobookman 8y ago

There's off exchange buyers and sellers of crypto who deal in orders of > 1M usd. It's fairly trivial to go from 10M BTC to 10M of a stable coin. Can't speak on how difficult it is to do 10M stable coin/btc to us bank

deleted 8y ago
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tim333 8y ago

The BTC/USD market on Kraken is pretty liquid. I think trading $10m wouldn't have been a problem if you spread it over a few days. They are trading $34m/day now and it would have been far more 6 months ago. Not sure what paperwork you need - as long as you could document the source was legit it would probably be ok. Also changing BTC/USDT would at least protected against the decline in value.

ac29 8y ago
> as long as you could document the source was legit it would probably be ok. But how many of these ICO's actually did proper KYC/AML stuff? My guess is very, very few, making getting fiat money into a legitimate bank much more difficult.
- tim333 8y ago
  Yeah not sure about that. I went for a few ICOs. The western ones all had quite a lot of KYC stuff. A Chinese one had nothing but I presume there are some banking arrangements in China that turn a blind eye. The whole China scene seemed pretty unregulated. If you wanted to launder it would probably have been the place though they seem to have cracked down now.

seibelj 8y ago

Circle Trade and Cumberland do OTC trades of large amounts. Nothing is magical about this. https://www.circle.com/en/trade https://www.circle.com/en/trade

dustingetz 8y ago
Sure OTC services exist (I believe Coinbase has one) but I think the whales spending $10m on BTC might have an inkling about buy low and sell high – aka they are decidedly not buying during the period between August 2017 and today, which is exactly the period they would need to be buying at scale for all these startups to unload their disintegrating assets.
- askmike 8y ago
  You are very wrong, OTC markets are very liquid right now. Also $10 million in BTC isn't very much, you can trade this on the public markets without slipping very much if you really want to.
  - dustingetz 8y ago
    yes of course they are liquid now, and of course you can trade it in crypto-crypto markets, the question is if you can trade it for USD cash money in a real bank account, eight months ago
    - leppr 8y ago
      There may have been more slippage than your startup was comfortable with, but the OTC market has always been liquid enough for startups to liquidate ETH/BTC from ICOs, even in the middle of the bear market.
      - dustingetz 8y ago
        show us some evidence!